In the entire range of American literature there is no stronger tie between a writer and a place than the tie between Henry Thoreau and Concord, Massachusetts. He was born there, on July 12, 1817. He grew up in Concord, returned there after college and, except for the brief time he boarded on Staten Island, New York, lived in Concord all his life. Concord was his only home; it provided him with much of his education and most of his literary subjects. Concord was his world, the pivot of his emotional, intellectual, and physical life. His attachment to Concord gave his writing a sense of place unsurpassed in American writing. Even Thoreau’s characteristic form, the excursion, derives in part from the powerful centripetal pull of Concord on Thoreau, on his need to return home after every outing. Almost every important aspect of his life and work is bound up, in one way or another, with Concord.

HIS NATIVE CONCORD

Of the writers who have made Concord, Massachusetts, a special precinct of the American imagination, only Henry Thoreau was born there. His paternal grandfather, Jean Thoreau, was a privateersman - not quite a pirate - born at St. Helier on the Isle of Jersey. Jean came to America involuntarily when he was nineteen, after being shipwrecked and rescued. Jean became John, married Jane Burns, the daughter of old Boston Quakers, and moved to Concord in 1800, where he bought what is now the north end of the Colonial Inn. He died in 1801, aged forty-seven, of tuberculosis aggravated by a cold caught while patrolling the streets of Boston against an anti-Catholic riot. A Mrs. Munroe of Concord told Thoreau she remembered his grandfather "calling one day and inquiring where blue vervain grew, which he wanted to make a syrup for his cough." The same tuberculosis would later kill Jean’s grandson. Jean’s son, John, was thirteen when the family moved to Concord. He became a storekeeper, a trader, a pencil-maker, and the father of Henry.